Personalized

Ideally, algorithms driving what should be the user experience would drive each of us farther apart from one another into individualized, customized experiences, driven by our unique values, past behavior and preferences.

So, why does Amazon tend to give us all the identical “people who purchased … also bought” titles for the New York Times best seller list and Pandora tend to play popular hits instead of delving ever deeper into undiscovered tunes of the type I appear to enjoy?

It seems that popularity and mass appeal may have their finger on the scale, creating a less personalized selection.

I think this is why radio’s research-driven music playlists based on known target groups who are large enough to build a radio format around so often prove to be personal enough for the nine out of ten music fans who still choose to use radio for such long periods of time every day.

We’re personalized enough.  Plus we have something else that Pandora makes no attempt to achieve. 

Radio format listeners relate to their favorite artists, personalities and stations as part of a local community which validates who they are, enables to work together to make everyone’s lives better.

It’s the human touch, and maybe some day computer scientists will find a way to automate that, but I have my doubts. 

There is a word for feeling like you’re relating to another real person and then discovering that you’ve been interacting with a software program:  creepy.

MLK Day Must Have Been A Slow News Day For Radio's Trades

• Radio Ink's top story:  musicFIRST Slams NAB, Radio on Playlist Repetition
• Radio World: MusicFirst: Radio Song Repetition 'Shocking'
• RAIN:  Bill O’Reilly recommends Pandora
• Legendary programmer Bill Hennes wants us to factor in music sales data:  Programmers Take The Easy Way Out

NAB's Dennis Wharton, fortunately, was quick to add some facts to the fury:  “If the charge is that local radio plays popular music that listeners enjoy, we plead guilty."

In about three weeks each and every A&O&B client will know precisely how many of their listeners use Pandora and all other media choices at their fingertips and how satisfied their average listener is with their favorite radio station, thanks to Roadmap 2014.  If you're an A&O&B client, don't miss this free opportunity to get facts and stats to guide you in the coming year!

Weekly callout, online testing, other innovative music tests and mScore tracking are among the many tools that take the guesswork out of programming decision-making you should be using if you have concerns about your potential audience's music preferences.

You can literally ask a large number of your listeners whether they are tired of hearing a song on the radio, whether they'd like to hear it more, less or about the same.   Track this over many weeks, follow their guidance and watch repetition complaints go down and time spent with your radio station increase.

This isn't a new idea.  Radio has proven its effectiveness for more than 30 years.

Music sales numbers mean a lot to you if you're an artist, a publisher or a record company, but I hope my radio competition uses them determine their music rotations.  I'll test them with my target audience and beat them every time!
  
Finally, the only reason I'd be concerned about what Bill O'Reilly makes use of to get his music when he wants it would be if you know that he had previously cumed your radio station.

More On Radio's Strengths Vs Pandora's Weaknesses

Jeff Vidler's Vision Critical research on Pandora users' use of and opinions about broadcast radio should serve as a wake up call for broadcast audio (the service formerly known as "radio").

Michael O'Malley highlighted with a red circle yesterday what we need to do in order to keep things that way.

 And, they expect us to do those same things on every digital platform.

Business cycles teach lessons, and what we're going through right now isn't new.

The courageous invest to gain market share when others are cutting back.

Radio Journalism VS PR

When two different trade media cover exactly the same story on the same day, that's not "news," that's reprinting press releases.

There's certainly nothing wrong with a competitor sending out PR each time they close a deal. Both Sirius and XM did it a decade ago. They also bought placement in movies and TV shows, all of which drove a growing impression back then that satellite radio was going to replace terrestrial radio among local business leaders.

"Local radio" is still standing and still wins the battle 10+ to one.

This is not to say that analog radio shouldn't worry about Pandora and all the emerging new media.

It's just to encourage you to tell your success stories in PR as well, while acknowledging that our value proposition on offer to both listeners and media buyers is under attack from new places.

So, what else is new?

Thanks to new media, we have two or three times the inventory to sell that we once did given all the platforms at our disposal.

1. Be sure that our clients get more than the results that expected by being better, more engagingly effective than any competing media's creative.

2. Give listeners more of what they come to us for and less of what they don't. Of course, doing so will mean that traditional "over the air" revenues will be flat to down unless we're able to aggressively raise rates, which in this economy and new media age is an immense challenge.

3. A more sustainable business model is to lower commercial loads "over the air" - making our analog products more listenable - and replace that revenue with money from all possible non-traditional sources.

Long term success requires long term thinking, and courage.

Pandora Satisfaction Slips

StateNets is a regional rep firm for the numerous state radio networks, so unless you're one of them it's unlikely that you are a regular on Chicago-based Tom Dobrez's website. That is why I'm going to take the liberty of republishing his most recent sales graphic, which you may want to include in your media kit.

Dobrez, after listening to Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman, who used the graphic as he placed radio in the new media world: "When you first got your iPod you were thrilled. You immediately downloaded music and made a few playlists. One for your bedroom listening, another for outside on the beach etc. But then you kind of tired of them and like most you shied away from them. Every once and awhile you might actually take the time to edit but rarely. Or perhaps you are a Pandora listener and you simply entered Peter Gabriel and you received a lot of tunes that sounded like Peter Gabriel. Some you actually thought were cool. However, your engagement lasted only a few days maybe weeks. Then your attention waned.

"In the world of Radio, the playlists are curated by professionals driven by extensive research. They can determine when a song is too old and magically you stop hearing it and it is replaced by something similar and fresher. Radio playlists change dynamically. That’s why you find yourself pulling your iPod cord out of the car tuner and going back to good old fashion radio every now and then. Well that and the human element which I’ll talk about on another day."

.. which means you and I had better bookmark his blog, eh?

Nashville's Country Genome Project

Pandora founder and evangelist Tim Westergren: “There is little doubt now that the future of radio is Internet radio, and personalized radio.”

I appreciated Tom Taylor's perspective, as he quoted the former musician, composer and Pandora visionary's claim of 3.6% of all U.S. radio listening, followed by "a radio executive in the hallway who isn’t discounting Pandora, but knows that broadcast radio, done right, offers a sense of community. So it may come down to broadcast versus customized radio – which must grow its share of ad dollars to break out of its business model where the royalties consume more than 50% of total revenue."

Music discovery is no doubt important to any transitional format, but as any experienced radio vet will testify, trying to use "new music first" as a tactic to create a musical difference almost always loses to the direct competition who lets the newbie familiarize the audience with the unfamiliar material and then plays the biggest hits.

It seems to me that, as with so many other upstarts that have emerged since the dawn of format radio, we don't have to fail for Pandora to succeed.

Newness and similar sounding genres are a dual-edged sword.

Today in the NAB convention hallways I ran into Edison Research's Larry Rosin a longtime student of country radio and music who currently has a concern about country even as new music and artists are clearly booming. His wife listens to country in her car almost constantly thanks to SiriusXM, but he can't listen as much over the last several years since New York has no country FM station anymore: "I hear all this new music, and she obviously loves the songs, but I can't tell one singer from another."

Radio doesn't need a genome project. We have one already. The music biz does it every time. The instant something starts to work, every label seems to have a soundalike.

For the majority of the population, it takes a curator to separate wheat from chaff.

Radio wins by doing what satellite and personalized streams can't do, making sure our local community of listeners gets plenty of the era and genre variety they prefer along with surprises presented by a trusted friend who relates compelling stories about artists we expose, to be sure that the fresh becomes familiar and favorite, reflecting local, topical values and concerns.

Pandora: Profits And Prophets

I will leave it to Mark Ramsey and Jerry Del Colliano to post daily sarcasm-laden advice to terrestial radio.

Instead, as you wait for "Hear 2.0" and "Inside Music And Media" blogs to load on your other browser tabs, I'd like to humbly direct you to Jim Edwards' blog (Pandora’s Business Model Looks Like a Suicide Pact).

Pandora is locked into a Catch-22: The more users it has, the more advertising it can sell against those pairs of ears. But at the same time, the more ears that are listening and the longer they listen, the more songs they hear and the more Pandora must pay out in music license fees. The company seems to realize that its business model, for the next 18 months at least, is a mutual suicide pact between its music costs and its revenues:

Content acquisition expenses increased $16.5 million due to increased royalty payments driven by increased listener hours and by higher revenue.

While we had net income in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010 and the second and third quarter of fiscal 2011, we expect to incur losses on an annual basis through at least the end of fiscal 2012.

Meanwhile, good ole fashioned local radio reaches more than nine of ten Americans every week and has solid profits on a station by station basis in all market sizes.

Someone may get rich owning Pandora in the near future (can you spell LinkedIn?), but the company's viability in the short or even medium term remains a question mark.

"Scale" can be a good thing ... as long as you're not scaling an immense wall of growing debt, and your operating costs aren't accelerating faster than your revenues.

Once Again, Bonneville Gets It Right

“We are in serious jeopardy. We’ve got to invest….we’ve run historically at such great margins, we’ve been reluctant to knock a point or two off of it to invest. I'm still not sure that streaming by itself is a great business.”

I am with Bruce Reese: streaming should be thought of as a promotional expense and we should stop playing low dough (or bonus spot) commercials on our streams, other than maybe sponsoring 20-60 minute blocks of the music we want our portals to be famous for.

If we are going to take on Pandora we need to use our megaphone differently on the web.

Example. Instead of getting a buck. Get 10 and play 10 less commercials. Or hours sponsored by major advertisers (not for value-added, for value!).

Dave Van Dyke: Pandora TSL Drop Is Due To Boredom

The newer the Pandora consumer the higher the satisfaction level. Over time, though, the satisfaction level is affected by "fatigue or boredom." Make no mistake that even those Pandora users who have been using the service for more than three years, retain high levels of satisfaction, but responses for the service being "Just OK", "Somewhat Dissatisfied" and "Very Dissatisfied" increase the longer the user experiences the service.

The Bridge Ratings President blogs that this is "The Decade of Radio Cannibalism."

Terrestial radio has it problems, but - fortunately for us in 2010 - a "bored" audience isn't one of them (at least not yet).

Lets resolve to improve our content and entertainment value to keep today's loyal listeners engaged.